Hotmail International Distrubuted Mail Archive

I had wandered out the front door of a house. There were three kittens feeding at a bowl on the front steps, and something about the oddity of the kittens appearing and vanishing cued me into lucidity.

Finding a computer, I tried talking out loud to it. It would type things back at me. I'd tell it to execute some command lines, but the lines it typed didn't work. I asked it to do a sudo apache2ctl restart to restart a web server for some reason, but prononced it as sudo apache two control restart. So the typing said sudo apache2 ctrl restart.

me: "No, it's "CTL for control, not CTRL""

screen: (typed) "It would be easier if you made me a user account on the machine."

me: "Hmm. Well, who are you?"

screen: "My name is Florian."

The situation sort of shifted a bit, and sometimes I was reading the communication on the side of a piece of glass...sometimes it shifted back to being in a terminal. A cartoon character of a king, perhaps a bit like a playing card, started talking to me as I was losing focus on the environment.

king: "What have I told you before about just trusting people for no reason? At the minimum, you should be getting some kind of vibe of them giving you an advantage or otherwise being sensitive to what you want. You should always be cautious...but when there's been zero value offered or given, definitely don't make yourself vulnerable!"

me: "I didn't do anything! I was asking questions! What do you think I have done wrong?"

I was lucid enough, and genuinely mad that this cartoon king was taking this judging attitude on me when I had explicitly not created any account for this person. He seemed to want to ignore my question and disappeared down a stairway, as I pulled myself along.

Trying to stay coherent I reached for the hand of a girl who seemed to be ahead of me on the stairway, but she disappeared as I descended it. When I reached the bottom of the stairs it seemed like I was in a house's hallway, and one of the doors was open but had a beaded curtain on it that reminded me of a similar curtain an ex-girlfriend had. I went into the room and thought of her, and someone looking like her entered the room after me.

Knowing it was a dream, and feeling like I wanted to, I initiated a pleasant sexual contact with her which lasted a fairly long time in lucid-dream terms. There were some oddities to it but I worked with those, until finally deciding that we should give it a rest and I should ask questions.

me: "I'm afraid we're not going to be able to finish this, because it just won't work. I am asleep, actually, in a bed elsewhere. And the girl you look like I haven't seen in a long, long time. So who are you?"

girl: "No."

me: "Uh. How is 'no' an answer to the question 'who are you'?"

girl: "It's a premise of the IDMA. I can't be anyone, there's no way to define me as having an age."

me: "What's the IDMA?"

girl: "It's the Hotmail International Distrubuted Mail Archive. Earlier did you see some things that looked like PDFs? That's what we're working on going over right now, with programs."

me: "So you write computer programs?"

girl: "Yes."

She had a computer and a web browser, I tried to bring up my name but it kept completing it incorrectly. We went through some back and forth as I tried to convey to her what my name was.

Currently I am experimenting with using Disqus for comments, however it is configured that you don't have to log in or tie it to an account. Simply check the "I'd rather post as a guest" button after clicking in the spot to type in a name.

The accounts written here are as true as I can manage. While the
words are my own, they are not independent creative works of fiction
—in any intentional way. Thus I do not consider the material to
be protected by anything, other than that you'd have to be
crazy to want to try and use it for genuine purposes (much less
disingenuous ones!) But who's to say?